Design as a process of originating and developing a plan for a product, structure or system has collaboration with art, architecture and technology. As an interdisciplinary faculty none the field is untouched by design and design thinking. Design exchanges the terminologies and methodologies with other disciplines like humanities, social sciences, engineering and sciences but undoubtedly it has some of the roots in the art. Looking the ancient Indian art and practices (up to 17th C AD) through the design perspective opens lot more opportunities to relocate the design practice in Indian context.
It is due to the efforts of scholars like Shri Aurobindo, Abanindranath Tagore, Ananda Coomaraswamy, E B Havell, T A Gopinath Rao, Sivaramamurthi, Henrich Zimmer, etc. Indian art and aesthetics has created its significance over the global art view. The ancient texts like Vishnu Dharmottar Puran, Natya Shastra, Vastusutra Upanishad talk about the methods and disciplines of a system and consideration of the effect on the viewer (user) made it uncomfortable to fit in the modern definition of art but the same attracting it towards design. The research done by Stella Kramarisch, Alice Boner, Kapila Vatsyayan expanded the view point beyond just history and philosophy and opened the new opportunities towards aesthetics and art practices. Drawing relations between design and Indian art is the next step on the same conduit which will yield into exploiting design theories and structures of Indian art.
This research work is an attempt to establish the correlation between ancient Indian Art and contemporary design. The relation is built upon the synchronic study of the literature and case studies. The question is ‘Focusing on the langue of the visual language of Indian art and leaving the parole as a style is it possible to extract the structure of the visible language of Indian aesthetics?
